Francis caught fibbing?

Jorge Mario Bergoglio was archbishop of Buenos Aires from 1998 to
2013 and president of the Argentine bishops’ conference from 2005 to
2011. During these years, as church officials in the US and Europe began
addressing the catastrophe of child sexual abuse by clergy – and even
as Popes John Paul II and Benedict made public statements – Bergoglio
stayed silent about the crisis in Argentina.

He released no documents, no names of accused priests, no
tallies of accused priests, no policy for handling abuse, not even an
apology to victims.

In his many homilies and statements (archived
on the Buenos Aires archdiocesan website), he attacked government
corruption, wealth inequities, and human sex trafficking, but he said
nothing about sexual violence by priests.

In On Heaven and Earth
(first published in Spanish in 2010), a wide-ranging collection of
conversations with Argentine rabbi Abraham Skorka, he suggested in fact
that the problem did not exist in his archdiocese:

In my diocese it
never happened to me, but a bishop called me once by phone to ask me
what to do in a situation like this and I told him to take away the
priest’s faculties, not to permit him to exercise his priestly ministry
again, and to initiate a canonical trial.

Bergoglio’s implication, that he handled no abusive priests, is implausible. Buenos Aires is Argentina’s largest diocese, and Bergoglio was one of its top executives from 1992 to 2013
– a period when tens of thousands of victims worldwide reported their
abuse to the Church. Based on data disclosed in dioceses in the US and
Europe, we estimate conservatively that from 1950 to 2013, more than 100 Buenos Aires archdiocesan priests offended against children and that dozens of them were known to archdiocesan supervisors, including Bergoglio.

Our first non-US database, this marks the launch of our global
coverage; we eventually will produce accused priest databases for all
countries with significant Catholic populations. (Also see the database in Spanish.)

We can hear Francis' defenders, "It is impossible to know everything that happens in a diocese. If abuses did happen, in all probability Francis didn't know about it." BishopAccountability.org has an answer and presents evidence which should lay that line of thinking to rest.

Questions about Bergoglio’s role in five abuse cases

The factors that have produced disclosure by bishops and
religious superiors in other countries – civil action by victims,
investigations of the church by prosecutors, and governmental inquiries –
have occurred little or not at all in the Federal Capital of Buenos
Aires, which is the territory of the archdiocese. As a result, almost no
information has emerged about Cardinal Bergoglio’s direct management of
accused priests. Only one Buenos Aires archdiocesan priest – Carlos
Maria Gauna – has been publicly accused. But in the high-profile cases
of four child molesters from religious orders or other dioceses –
Grassi, Pardo, Picciochi, and Sasso – there is evidence that Bergoglio
knowingly or unwittingly slowed victims in their fight to expose and
prosecute their assailants. Victims of all four offenders say that they
sought the cardinal's help. None of them received it, even those who
were poor, struggling on the periphery of society – the people whom Pope
Francis has championed. (According to Bergoglio's former spokesman, the
cardinal declined to meet with victims.)

• Fr. Julio César Grassi – Grassi was
convicted in 2009 of molesting a boy who had lived in a home for street
children that Grassi founded. After Grassi’s conviction, Bergoglio
commissioned a secret study to persuade Supreme Court judges of Grassi's
innocence. Bergoglio’s intervention is believed to be at least part of
the reason that Grassi remained free for more than four years following
his conviction. He finally was sent to jail in September 2013. See our detailed summary of the Grassi case with links to articles.

• Fr. Rubén Pardo – In 2003, a priest with
AIDS who had admitted to his bishop that he had sexually assaulted a boy
was discovered to be hiding from law enforcement in a vicarage in the
archdiocese of Buenos Aires, then headed by Bergoglio. Pardo also was
reportedly hearing children's confessions and teaching in a nearby
school. One of Bergoglio’s auxiliary bishops, with whom he met every two
weeks, appears to have lived at the vicarage at the same time.
Typically, an ordinary must give permission for a priest to live and
work in his diocese. It is unlikely that Pardo lived and ministered in
Buenos Aires without Bergoglio's approval. See our detailed summary of the Pardo case.

• Brother Fernando Enrique Picciochi, S.M. –
After a victim discovered that his abuser had fled Argentina to the US,
eluding law enforcement, the victim sought Bergoglio’s help in getting
released from the confidentiality order imposed by the cleric’s
religious order. He conveyed his request in meetings with Bergoglio’s
private secretary and with the auxiliary bishop, current archbishop
Mario Poli. The archdiocese would not help. See our detailed summary of the Picciochi case.

• Fr. Mario Napoleon Sasso – In 2001, following
a diagnosis as a pedophile at a church-run treatment center, Sasso was
made pastor of a very poor parish with a community soup kitchen in the
Zárate-Campana diocese. In 2002-2003, he sexually assaulted at least
five little girls in his bedroom off the soup kitchen. In 2006, with
Sasso in jail but not yet convicted, the parents of the little girls
reportedly sought Bergoglio's help. Bergoglio was then president of the
Argentine bishops' conference, and the soup kitchen was just 25 miles
from the Buenos Aires archdiocese. Bergoglio would not meet with them.
See our detailed summary of the Sasso case.

• Rev. Carlos Maria Gauna – Gauna was an
archdiocesan priest under Bergoglio's direct supervision. In 2001, two
girls at a school filed a criminal complaint saying Gauna had touched
them inappropriately. Bergoglio reportedly was going to look into it.
Gauna still works in the Buenos Aires archdiocese. Notably, he's now a
deacon and a hospital chaplain – possible indicators that Bergoglio
considered the allegations credible but decided to demote him rather
than remove him from ministry. See our detailed summary of the Gauna case.

2 comments:

Fr. Grassi's case is very far from clear. I'm writing from Argentina, and there is a high probability that the guy was framed. He was a media personality, and during the 90's he was on TV collecting money for causes. At some point a shady character, known as "Corcho" Rodríguez got in the picture. Fr. Grassi apparently refused to get with him into certain dealings, and the guy promised revenge. Next thing you know, multimedia group Clarin was showing an investigative report with explosive revelations on Fr. Grassi. In fact, Clarin tried to do it again, at least once, accussing a catholic group called Servi Trinitatis of reducing women to slavery, but the argentinian judiciary dismissed the whole thing.

To Anonymous - thanks for this on Fr. Grassi - sounds eerily similar to what happened to Fr. Ritter who ran Covenant House in the United States. He was apparently making dossiers of the rich and powerful that were abusing children in Church, state and entertainment/media. Soon thereafter a known homosexual prostitute was brought into the mix to 'testify' that Fr. Ritter was guilty of this 'crime.' Fr. Ritter went to his death always proclaiming his innocence, but after he was taken down from Covenant House, from what I understand that organization never did the good that it had done before under him. I always suspected foul play where he was concerned, though considering what happened to Fr. Kunz who was murdered in apparent satanic ritual also over the alleged compiling of dossiers against clergy in the novus ordo who were engaging in sexual immorality, Fr. Ritter was probably lucky that he didn't end up murdered himself if the stories about his dossier compiling were true.